Tony McNulty, the combative employment minister tipped to replace Jacqui Smith as Home Secretary, has branded a high profile warning by a former MI5 chief that the government risks creating a police state as "abject nonsense".
McNulty was responding to criticisms of anti-terror laws by Dame Stella Rimington, head of the domestic …

Which factory produces these nutters?

This guy's record is awful.

He is of Irish descent, educated by the Merkins, currently in charge of employment at the time of record unemployment, and responsible for a lot of the terror, anti privacy legislation. This is the enemy within our country.

Thanks Harrow East, look just vote conservative as you normally do next time please, the behind the scenes architect for the downfall of Britain is this one.

@ James

"Is he really being tipped to be the new Home Secretary, the blokes clueless! I can't stand watching him on Question Time, he seems to be totally devoid of independent thought, and all he can do is parrot the party line. I can't think of anyone in the government more annoying or useless, and that's saying something!"

Never thought I'd say it

Read between the lines!

"Wrong to suggest that had all the things we planned been passed we'd have been a police state"

In other words, the things they've planned AND passed have been enough. And...

"wrong to suggest we have somehow stumbled towards a police state"

They didn't stumble. They went there intentionally. And Mr McNutty has just admitted it.

Oh well, see you in the Gulag after my show trial in the People's Court. Only one more thing to decide - when the Stasi kick my door down at 3am, do I come quietly as a political prisoner or go down fighting? I can't decide - perhaps some kind minister could decide for me?

@Can someone please explain ...

If you look up the details of both the present and previous chancellors of the exchequer you will also see that they also do not have the correct educational background for the job they are currently being paid for.

Must be a requirement to be a minister, so providing you have no financial background, logically, AC, you could be chancellor (as could my cat).

Oh dear me

Hanlon's Razor...

tells us we ought not: "attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". Having witnessed the administrations of Bush and Blair or Dumb and Dumber, as they're known in some circles, I've come to the conclusion malice and stupidity are not mutually exclusive.

Dame Stella Rimington, at 73; an age when diminished mental capacity would be expected, appears to have a, vastly, superior understanding of the situation than Britain's employment minister, Mr. McNutty.

Mr. McNutty's statement: "...I think on this she is totally and utterly wrong", when it's obvious to anyone "with the brains God gave geese" that she is totally and utterly right, suggests he suffers a high degree of cognitive disfunction.

Likewise his statement: "Wrong to suggest that had all the things we planned been passed we'd have been a police state, and wrong to suggest we have somehow stumbled towards a police state"...unless Mr. McNutty means Dame Rimington is wrong to suggest "we'd have been a police state" as "we", already, are and wrong to suggest "we have somehow stumbled towards a police state" as "we", intentionally, became a police state, as expeditiously as "we" were able.

McNutty referring to Dame Rimington's use of language as "loose" and suggesting her statement "plays into the hands of our enemies" is worthy of Monty Python and this from a man who uses the phrase "abject nonsense". I imagine anyone with an elementary command of the English language would realize Dame Rimington's statements were an articulate expression of her, obviously, coherent thoughts, on the matter. I, also, imagine anyone with even a passing knowledge of the history of fascism would recognize Mr. McNutty's "plays into the hands of our enemies" as a tactic employed by fascist regimes, for centuries.

Dame Rimington's understanding of the situation, also, appears vastly superior to Britain's transport Secretary, Geoff Goon. Mr. Goon's statement: "blocking the plans on civil liberties grounds would grant terrorists a licence to kill" is ridiculous. I expect most schoolchildren are aware that killing people, without just cause, is illegal under existing legislation, preventing the British government from stripping the British people of their legal and human rights would not exempt terrorists from that legislation and, given terrorists almost invariably kill by way of a suicide attack, no legislation is likely to deter them.

It seems to me, the only conclusion we can come to, here, is: Mr. McNutty and Mr. Goon are either stupid or malicious and, possibly, both. You people need to give your heads a shake and remove them from your colons, before it's too late, assuming it's not already.

A couple of pages you may find interesting: http://www.whale.to/b/in_their_own_words_q.html and http://www.rense.com/general27/bushnaz.htm

Enemies

"Even to use such language so loosely plays in to the hands of our enemies."

If by 'Enemies' you mean the tax paying British public, then yes, it does. Somehow I get the feeling that we are now all enemies of the state.

Jesus Christ, just when I thought it could'nt get any worse than Jackboot Smith, they wheel out this fucking vacuous ingnorant turd. The government appears to be a bottomless cesspit of increasingly talentless authoritarian facists. I've scraped more intelligent things off the bottom of my shoe. It's almost as if they know that they're going to be flushed down the toilet next year and are out to implement a scorched earth policy on our rights and freedoms.

And I have zero expectations that the Tories will do anything to repeal any of the Stalinist legislation that has been implemented over the last 10 years.

A revision of the OED entry "enemy"

Well...

I suppose at least we KNOW beforehand, that we are getting a another arsehole to replace Wacky J! Should be a fun run up to the election then, with McNutter desperately trying to get everything Gordo gave Wacky to do before Labour get booted in favour of the other bunch of useless tossers!

We are in a police state already

" ... Wrong to suggest that had all the things we planned been passed we'd have been a police state, and wrong to suggest we have somehow stumbled towards a police state."

They don't need all of them - we're already there and have been for a while.

All we need is another petrol protest and the wheels will begin to roll - check out the Civil Contingencies Act 2004: http://www.opsi.gov.uk/Acts/acts2004/ukpga_20040036_en_1

I think when he said "loose" use of language "plays into the hands of our enemies" he was referring to NuLab's enemies. I think by that he means us or anyone who values their liberty.

The AC earlier was spot on about apathy.

I make a point of mentioning the IRA terrorism in the 80s and 90s and how virtually nobody died or was injured (no offence to those who were and their families) and how we had less restriction on our liberty then than now (I suppose I'm talking about the mainland UK here).

If I'm told that the threat is greater now because of dirty bombs I'll mention the fact that nobody had thought of them until the government gave detailed instructions on what to do. Erm I mean warned everyone about them. If that's not good enough I'll point out that Japan swallowed a couple of real nuclear bombs and recovered alright.

The best thing to do though, is to remind the people you know that the government works for us and not the other way around. As crazy as it seems, most people don't seem to realize that.

Our biggest problem is that we haven't had a dictator since Cromwell.

Just remember the words of an East German: "If we'd all attack the secret police with shovels spades and pitch forks every time they burst in, they'd have run out of secret police pretty quickly".

The blue-number brigade

Commenters in the Reg on these news events have demonised every Home Sec since at least David Blunkett (remember him?) in pejorative terms such as Wacqui Jacqui and now Tom McNutty.

The ideas aren't new: look at the attitude of the 70s TV series 1990 to show the fear writers could extrapolate from the Labour government policies then.

Part of it is Labour but most of it is a government machine that wants to grind us all exceeding fine so that we are all tidy and under control. The 'people' who really want national identity pass-law databases are the civil servants behind the politicians. We can't demonise them because they don't give interviews as often as Home Secretaries.

He's right!

He may have chosen his words more intelligently than is apparent: this kind of talk certainly does play into the hands of "our" enemies, if by "we" he means the Labour Government. "We" have created lots of enemies (by invading their countries, bombing their children etc), and "we" now understandably fear that revenge may be on a lot of peoples' agendas.

But I'm not part of that "we", and they're not my enemies - I sympathise with them, because I voted and demonstrated to try to stop the madness that "we" inflicted on the world. If "we" get hurt because of what "we" did in Blair's wars, "we" are getting what we deserve.

If the courts won't prosecute Blair, Hoon, Brown etc for their illegal invasion and mass-murder, I can understand why the maimed and the orphaned might seek extra-judicial vent for their understandable feelings. I just hope that when they do so, they are more careful than "we" were about killing innocents in the crossfire.

Cowards

I've always had the opinion that anyone who suggests we should be happy to give up civil liberties in order to stop terrorism is just a coward looking to save his or her own skin.

Trouble is for some reason voters never seem to want to make these idiots pay for their cowardice. If nothing else it confuses me that people are okay with the cost of all this pointless technology. You guys do understand that the money government uses to buy all this useless shite comes from your own paychecks right?

My argument will always be that literally anyone with the ability to crayon could make more competent decisions than the spineless twat that believes id cards and biometrics will in some way prevent terrorists from killing people. So next time vote for anyone but the person currently holding office and I guarantee you pretty much can't go wrong. It might take a few elections before they get it, but eventually politicians will understand that if they want to hold office they need to grow a backbone and learn how to spend our money on things we actually need. Just keep voting them out of office until they do.

George Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'

Voting them out

To all those who feel they might be holding their nose and voting Tory at the next general election, might I point out that in *many* constituencies Dave's lot are not the second party. If you *just* want to evict the government whilst you still have voting rights, there are smarter ways of using them.

And to overseas observers, amazed that we put up with this, I'm reminded of a story I once heard about an American lady who came to work in the UK and spent the first few months in almost continuous conflict with the management. Eventually, she realised that she was the only one with this problem. Everyone else simply *ignored* the management, and since policy actually changed every few months one could reasonably say that even the management ignored the management. It's the British Way -- stiff upper lip and all that.

Of course, it only works in the political arena if the governing party gets the boot every couple of terms. Leave them in for too long and they get the idea that people ought to listen to them.

RW

"Socialism" needs a police state to operate.

"and wrong to suggest we have somehow stumbled towards a police state"...

We didn't stumble, it has been deliberate.

As Churchill once said...

"No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo...Socialist policy is abhorrent to British ideas of freedom...there can be no doubt that socialism is inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism."

Don't fall for the either-or trap!

Yes, Labour are dreadful, but never forget they got elected by copying the Tories' policies. Bringing back the Tories would just be more of the same. We don't have to have either of them, there are alternatives...

V for Vendetta icon...

I apologize,.... if wrong and not right..

"Oh dear me .... I worked alongside Tony McNulty for a few years. He's a very clever man, and not above telling huge lies to make a point." ... By Anonymous Coward Posted Wednesday 18th February 2009 16:31 GMT

Err, ... A very clever man wouldn't need to tell lies for anything or anyone, AC, ergo is Tony McNulty not a very clever man?

And, oh dear me, he works for Mr Brown and his chums/colleagues, who has presided, pushed and lorded it over more than 10 years of Sustained and Maintained National Decline. Incompetent is not nearly realistic enough as it suggests a Lack of Forethought. Venal and Venereal is much more appropriate....... and Criminal too, of course, in the First Degree.

EFG

typical politician

he is hardly likely to say "oh bugger you got me" and admit that's what they doing now are they...not yet anyway.....

this is just rattle throwing as he knows that the educated and clever people (the minority....intellectuals..see the pattern emerging?) will listen to that 'evil woman' while the plebs who read the papers will continue to swallow the "foreigners, terrorists, druggies, liberals and peados" rhetoric of their favourite former chip wrapper

@ null

"Good bye Wacky Jacqui. Hello Tom McNutty."

And not forgetting ... Goodbye Tom McNutty, goodbye NuLabour.

This issue of invasion of privacy is the biggest one of all for me in the next election. It convinces me, also, that NuLabour is totally devoid of morality and is a spineless, toadying group of snouters.

Let's have some facts

Anyone who still has serious doubts about the validity of Dame Stella Rimington's comments might like to take a look at the Coroners and Justice Bill Chapter 8 Section 152 and also the report "Assessing Damage, Urging Action" published by the International Commission of Jurists on 16th Feb. 2009.

The idea that massive surveillance intrinsically yields good intelligence is popular, but fundamentally flawed. There is a finite amount of useful intelligence at any given moment, so the optimum approach is directed, evolutionary and requires detached, impartial assessment (see R.V Jones, Most Secret War, Hamish Hamilton 1978 and Abram Shulsky, Silent Warfare, 2nd Edition, Brasseys (US) 1993). There should be a sound justification for a particular fragment of data to qualify as "intelligence". Monitoring everything and everyone and trying to find "patterns" in the mess just buries the real intelligence in meaningless noise and makes it harder to identify. As a result not only is the potential for effective pre-emptive countermeasures diminished, but serious miscarriages of justice can occur - often due to false conclusions being drawn from misinterpreted fragile correlations - as indeed documented in the ICJ report.

In reality, the probability of any one of us falling foul of a terrorist attack is vanishingly small, but because of the very rarity of such events it's also almost completely unpredictable (and therefore effectively unavoidable should one happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time). A bit like getting struck by a meteor while out walking the dog (or indeed winning the National Lottery). Consequently keeping tabs on everyone in case they might be a potential perpetrator is (to use a technical term) daft.

However the current brute force response to this problem is not new. The same kind panic infected Britain in the 1880s and lead to both the founding of Special Branch and similar calls for the curtailment of freedoms in the name of security. In some cases this extended to the use of agents provocateurs who incited and possibly perpetrated terrorist acts (Bernard Porter, The Origins of the Vigilant State, Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1987).

Of course we must always keep in mind that no-one is actively trying to restrict our freedoms per se. Any restrictions are just unfortunate collateral damage in the fight to protect us against extremely rare extreme events - a kind of "friendly fire". What has been forgotten is just how rare the events that we are being "protected" from are.

But the thing that's truly scary in the ICJ report: "... certain governments want to reserve for themselves the power to designate a class of people who are not entitled to the same rights as other human beings" (page 12 para 2) - a situation that the European Convention on Human Rights was defined expressly to prevent ever happening again after the 1930s-40s, and the very mind set we attribute to the "enemy". Personally, I see a disturbing similarity emerging between the positions of the "bad guys" and "good guys" - fanatics all, regardless of specific flavour. As Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have said "A people willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both."

Tom a Hawk

Tom McNulty clearly ticks all the NuLabour boxes that qualify him to succeed the Wacky Wonder.

1. Contemptuous dismissal of someone who is infinitely better informed about a subject than he is himself.

2. Dogmatic adherence to the party line that private citizens must be regulated with brutal Stalinist discipline while the so-called wealth creators are let off the leash in order to create nothing less than the worst economic crisis for a hundred years.

3. Replaces rational, evidence-based policy making with the conviction-based politics of Thatcher.

4. Fully subscribes to Mandelson's dictum "New Labour has no problem with people becoming filthy rich", although to be fair he did add "provided they pay their taxes".( But, being a hell of a lot smarter than the NuLabour dummies, the filthy rich promptly off-shored their tax liabilities to tax havens like the Cayman islands.)

5. Fully paid up member of the Pontius Pilate sect within NuLabour: We do not torture people, we get other people to do it for us.